Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Abuse Is A Boomerang

The Bad Apple series is based on a true incident from my life--An acquaintance was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. Not quite the way stories play out on television, we learned there was a backstory of abuse that took place 25 years earlier. I thought about this murder for years then finally wanted to write about it and found a way. There are repercussions to abuse.

Today I commented about a snippy blogpost some agent made and it probably seemed over-the-top. Maybe it was. But the bottom line for agents and editors publishers is that they've been abusing writers for decades. It will come back and bite you in one way or another. Whether it's me telling the truth about their bad behavior, or it's just hundreds of people quitting tradpub for indie to the extent that their industry is endangered. You can't abuse people without repercussions.

There's something in the human spirit that can't be broken and that will fight back. Maybe it's in an appropriate way, maybe it's an inappropriate way like when Joe killed Jack.

Now you have agents and publishers and even some writers like Scott Turow and Richard Russo bemoaning the state of affairs with indie publishing. In a classic demonstration of projection, they're blaming writers and Amazon but this is a situation they created. There has been an abuse of power for years. People will react to being mistreated. As Neal said about Joe, he was "like a demonic boomerang" and so is the abuse heaped upon writers for years. It will come back, it must. It's the law of retribution--hok ha-gemul in Hebrew.